Hyperobjects

Notes I’ve made as this project develops.

Statement:

These photographs are a response to Timothy Morton’s book “Hyperobjects”, that contends contemporary issues like global warming and climate change are simply too colossal for us to fully comprehend because they stretch over time and space. My images present the “evidence” that Hyperobjects are all around us and that climate change is visible, should we just look.

Mark Fisher:
“The haunting comes first: the psychological does not subsume the spectral; it is construed by psychoanalysis as a symptom of the spectral.

The ghosts that should most haunt us are the spectres of events that have not yet happened.”

“Anything you can do, I can do meta” - Morton

It’s weird making photographs knowing they’ll never be viewed as historic artefacts.

Thinking about Marc Augé’s Non-Places:
Trying to bring HyperObjects “home” by showing the evidence “here” rather than positioning climate change as “somewhere else”. There’s almost instantaneous nostalgia for the very recent past (a time pre-covid, pre-Brexit, pre-now), a sentimentality for what we’ve lost, a backward tilt - a way of insulating one’s self from living in a future/present which is insecure and frightening. A reality Adam Curtis explores in Hypernormalisation. These images seek to confront that.

Everything becomes history ever more quickly (Augé p22), it’s on our heels. The future is here in relation to global warming, (Morton) meaning the present is crushed and distorted between these two hyperobjects. So, then: How do we live?

Dream Culture

Images:

- Every single plant on earth. Dying.
- There are 10,000 passenger planes in the air right now.
- The last stop of oil will be used.
- 100,000 parts per billion.
- 1.5°
- Rubbish dump
- Recycling - aircon units
- Massive Victoriana - Railway - St Pancras
- Air
- Time
- Solar panel
- Wind turbines
- Oil refinery - Salt End - Immingham
- Bridgewood plastics - Hessle
- Every SUV in London
- Statue of a slave owner
- Marx - All that is solid melts into air
- Evolution - Natural History Museum - Darwin
- Empire
- Burnt out building
- Hostile architecture - to stop homeless people sleeping
- AirCon
- Ghost towers
- 1400 billions of tons of CO2 since start of industrial revolution. Trapped in lower atmosphere
- Over production
- DuPont Teflon
- Micro plastics
- Dissent or perish
- Scrapped car
- Crashed car
- Car engine - flash close up
- Circuit board

Jason Hickel:
"A long view of the history of capitalism reveals that growth has always depended on enclosure. The Lauderdale Paradox first articulated by James Maitland holds that an increase in “private riches” is achieved by choking off “public wealth”. This is done not only in order to acquire free value from the commons but also, I argue, in order to create an “artificial scarcity” that generates pressures for competitive productivity. Degrowth seeks to invert the Lauderdale Paradox. By calling for a fairer distribution of existing resources and the expansion of public goods, degrowth demands not scarcity but rather abundance.”

Rainer Maria Rilka:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.
No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

Links:

On HyperObjects:
https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/introducing-the-idea-of-hyperobjects

Lichen:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/nature-and-pollution-what-lichens-tell-us-about-toxic-air.html

Animals crawled onto land:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025464-600-first-fossil-of-fish-that-crawled-onto-land-discovered/

The Limits To Growth - 1972:
https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/

Plastics:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-plastic-problem.html

Plastic:
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/7281/every-single-piece-of-plastic-ever-made-still-exists-heres-the-story/

Mass extinction event:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html

Invasive species:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-are-invasive-species.html

Carbon capture building materials:
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/01/solid-idea-for-dealing-with-carbon-emissions/

Object Oriented Ontology:
https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-art-53690

OOO:
https://philosophyofmovementblog.com/2020/08/20/what-is-object-oriented-ontology-what-is-actor-network-theory-what-is-the-philosophy-of-movement/

Ballard - The Drowned World:
https://literariness.org/2019/06/02/analysis-of-j-g-ballards-novels/

Ballard and Ecology:
http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/AHR57_Tait.pdf

“Ballard produces a radical imaginary that ‘explores the deep implications of time, space, psychology and evolutionary biology in order to dismantle anthropocentric narratives and, in turn, open up alternative ways of experiencing, and conceiving of, contemporary human subjectivity’”

Ballard wrote of the millions swept to their deaths in The Wind from Nowhere:

“They were helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survive, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly.”


Living In The Ends Times

Living in the End Times

These are the notes I made whilst making Living in The End Times:

What a concrete block and a jellyfish have in common.

Think of William Burroughs cut up narrative style.

Excel centre London - arms fair and nightingale hospital

Tate and Lyle - Pontoon dock

Empty massive yard opposite O2

Plastic wrapped meat

The totalitarianism inherent in corporate structures.

Picture of a globe

Images of the future: Collapse being a good example.

Strong flash shot of small plant growing in the gutter.

Violence as effect of material inequality - text panels 

Robbe Grillet - check out


Pour away that youth; That overflows the heart; Into hair and mouth; Take the grave’s part, Tell the bone’s truth.

Throw away that youth; That jewel in the head; That bronze in the breath; Walk with the dead; For fear of death.

by Phillip Larkin.


One cannot take photographs with a dictionary - Berger

The anxiety of NOT being productive

Between here and nowhere- Maurice Blanchot

The activation of a memory in a moment of crisis - victor burgin

Requiem for a dream

The old man and the gun

Notes to self.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Philip K Dick 

Always interesting when mainstream types tell you how different they are.

Tomorrowland

A weird disconnect between needing people and a ‘someone’ and a total need to be absolutely on my own.

The architecture of a planned concealment - paraphrasing Lewis Baltz

Violator - Depeche Mode

Accelerator - FSOL

The future casts its shadow over the present in a strange reversal of the usual

Bertolt Brecht: photography in the hands of the bourgeoisie has become a terrible weapon against the truth. 1931.

Why film? Link to past. Chemical reaction to light. Latent image as metaphor.

BAE systems

Make a mock up book as a note book

Rooms for sleep cleansed of dreams - Ilya Ehrenburg

Prototype approximations

The drunkards den

The onrushing algorithmic (singularity)

A simple note

Studies and further studies in a dying culture - Christopher Caudwell

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Catastrophe anthem - Clark

A dependence on chaos

Anatomy of the peripheral nervous system

Coordinated management of meaning

Invisible manipulation data

Radical autonomy

Propositions and provocations

Immolations

Safe in the hands of love - Yves Tumor

The age of anxiety - WH Auden:

We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

Inertia

A series of photographs exploring the human condition and the inherent limitations this entails.

From the misrepresentation of life via social media, the Maslowian restrictions of food and shelter, the earth bound limitations sat in the historic understanding that all cultures are, eventually, bound to fail.

Cockroaches and rats. The alienating and engaging experience of London.

88 images. Total number of perfect ratio Fibonacci sequence.

Try some images with additions like text or blank areas.

Things behind screens, glass, coverings as comment about temporality and metaphysics. The subconscious. Things that are hidden or not immediately available to ones consciousness. Instinctive traits. Containment.

Systems built towers Broadwater Farm Haringey.

Anthropocene.
Fire nearly out. Record towards the end. Things running out. Empty fuel gauge. 

Man made but seemingly natural spaces. Lea Bridge wetlands.

Toxic masculinity. Razors next to the bath. Intimate human elements.

Try to amalgamate James Sykes Photo work with the freedom of The Both And work. 

Try to be spontaneous and authentic. Explore staged images. Shoot more.

Complex systems:

Overview: what is the study of Complex Systems?

Complex Systems is a new field of science studying how parts of a system give rise to the collective behaviours of the system, and how the system interacts with its environment. Social systems formed (in part) out of people, the brain formed out of neurons, molecules formed out of atoms, the weather formed out of air flows are all examples of complex systems. The field of complex systems cuts across all traditional disciplines of science, as well as engineering, management, and medicine. It focuses on certain questions about parts, wholes and relationships. These questions are relevant to all traditional fields.

Why Complex Systems?

The study of complex systems is about understanding indirect effects. Problems that are difficult to solve are often hard to understand because the causes and effects are not obviously related. Pushing on a complex system “here” often has effects “over there” because the parts are interdependent. This has become more and more apparent in our efforts to solve societal problems or avoid ecological disasters caused by our own actions. The field of complex systems provides a number of sophisticated tools, some of them concepts that help us think about these systems, some of them analytical for studying these systems in greater depth, and some of them computer based for describing, modelling or simulating these systems.

Three approaches to the study of Complex Systems:

There are three interrelated approaches to the modern study of complex systems,

(1) how interactions give rise to patterns of behaviour,

(2) understanding the ways of describing complex systems, and

(3) the process of formation of complex systems through pattern formation and evolution.

The above is interesting in terms of intersectionality. Combine all of my thinking into one cohesive body of work with many narratives including micro and macro observations, relationships between things and interconnectedness.

Systems, Elements and Relations.

Try to make the work so any two/three images could be shown together and still make a cohesive statement. Get some prints made to try this out. Get 12 images printed by Labyrinth 12x16 for portfolio. Talk with the staff there about
style. Then find a portfolio review. Submit more often. 

Reconsider: UCL Documentary Photography MA

Shoot some B&W? Maybe as a counterpoint to the colour? Fuji Neopan 400.

Shoot a roll of Fuji quickly this week to check the exposure.

Organise Lightroom folders, make one for film project

A brief history of complexity

The uncertainty principle

Vauxhall platform 3 looking back to city. Like Nigel Agar.

Re-enactments

Something struggled for and easily lost

The authenticity project

The contingent relations of complex systems

Make a book with blank pages - Ed Ruscha

A form of nostalgia

The malady of death

The future is still so much bigger than the past

Living in the end times - Zizek

William Gibson - near future - All tomorrow’s parties

The long collapse/emergency

Ex Vivo - ‘out of the living’, experiments done on human tissue outside of the human body

Obviously fake things

Overcoming the limitations of the substructure - El Lissitsky

The Constellations of Heaven - WB Yeats

Visually hungry social world

All film

Move away from square-on dead pan

The images must be multi-layered with multiple meanings.

Middle distance.

Slow, methodical, frame/check/move

Try to photograph my experience.

Missing M; Lack of home; London; City; Bars; Booze; Traveling; Different beds; Music; Work; Art; Politics; Blurred; Bar on Ridley Road.

All film but 6x9, 35mm and auto so varied;

Loosen up - channel Waplington;

Think of narrative over single images; Get out and make more work; Underground; Gentrification; Graffiti; Punk ethic; Gimme Shelter;

Mix of styles, images, subjects; Not clearly one thing; Found images; Rephotographed; Advertising images; The Spectacle;

A portrait of London; Old and new; Isolation; Loneliness; Impersonal; Closeness of people; Dirt; Sewers; Gleaming buildings; Vertical city; Moving; Slow sync flash.

Airbus Stevenage - BAE Systems

Use the personal to explore the universal

tripod close ups Lea Bridge river

How to photograph the Internet and politics - photograph WiFi hotspot locations

Something about circuits - the things that connect us…

Capitol park M62 massive blank buildings

TKMaxx M62 near A1

Ruinenwert - ruin value Brian Ladd

The Gun: Secret Plans and Clever Tricks.

The Edge Lands - a series of photographs about margins and the marginalised


Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough

A Flask of wine, a Book of Verse and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness

…is Paradise enough


All palaces are temporary palaces

The solution machine

And sometimes it goes the other way

Days of future passed

When absence becomes a special kind of presence

Small Energies - Balil.

Old scenes. New details.

One shot in focus. Same shot out of focus

Living in the end times.

Poll tax riot - Trafalgar Square - Extinction Rebellion

A decision ‘for’ something is ‘always’ a decision ‘against’ something else. 


The Privatisation of Public Space

This blog oulines my ideas, thinking and research.

POPs is about more than gentrification - it’s about disempowerment. A dystopian future where few own anything and everything has been privatised from the ground we stand on, the water we drink and the air we breathe, the seeds of which are clearly visible now.

Metaphor for my private experience of these pseudo-public spaces.These images attempt to disrupt the prevailing narrative of the spectacle.

It is possible to imagine that at some point in the future the landowner erects a fence around these spaces and charges entry fees and/or restricts access to these once communal spaces. This idea could be extended to those from particular social, ethnic or economic groups effectively making a two tiered experience of our cities - on that can afford to pay the other for those that cannot. This already exists, of course, through poverty and social exclusion, though the privatisation of these spaces would solidify this on a legal footing.

The Dystopia of Privatising Air:

Peter Brabeck, CEO of the world’s largest foodstuff company, Nestle, has begun plans to privatise the air we breathe within municipal borders across the globe.

Nestle’s idea is to make air a quantifiable commodity sold on the open market. The company would then contract with municipal leaders (from New York to New Zealand) to be the principal supplier of the air we breathe.  Meaning: if New Yorkers wanted to breathe the air around them within the city’s limits, they would need to pay Nestle in order to do so.

This news comes on the heels of Brabeck’s announcement that he considers fresh water to be a commodity that should be wholly privatized rather than a human necessity to which global citizens have a right to unfettered access:

According to Brabeck, access to water is not a human right, and those who purport such claims are extremists.

Now, Nestle’s CEO is categorising the air we breathe as a commodity as well. “Those on the left backed by NGOs will say that access to air is a human right,” Braback said when reached for comment. “However, oxygen is just like anything else. It’s a commodity. People want it. And a market value should ascribed to it.”

When asked whether making air a commodity could potentially leave millions (or billions) of poor global citizens out in the cold, Braback rejected such thoughts as fear-mongering. “Once we know what air is worth, we’ll know how large the subsidies need to be to keep poor people breathing.”

With this in mind it is not impossible that in our lifetime the water we drink, the air we breathe, the building we live in and the land we stand on, we have no right to. A situation where citizenship is reduced to our ability to pay, or not, for access to our basic needs.

Kinder Scout mass trespass: http://www.kindertrespass.com/

Trafalgar Square - owned by the Queen - Poll Tax riot 

Housing right to buy - privatising social housingTrace the journey/ownership of one piece of land.

Vernacular Landscape submission:

https://subjectivelyobjective.com/product/the-vernacular-of-landscape-submission-fee/

East Village letting agency:

http://www.getlivinglondon.com/about/history

News articles:

https://tclf.org/places/learn-what-are-cultural-landscapes/vernacular-landscapes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12771744

http://www.eastlondonhistory.co.uk/london-olympics-east-end-regeneration/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/11/granary-square-privately-owned-public-space

https://www.kingscross.co.uk/whos-developing-kings-cross

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/27/london-olympic-park-success-five-years-depends

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/25/squares-angry-privatisation-public-space

https://www.ft.com/content/45cd3dbe-34dd-11e7-99bd-13beb0903fa3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_privately_owned_public_spaces_in_London

http://www.gigl.org.uk/privately-owned-public-spaces/

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/the-first-map-of-londons-pseudo-public-spaceepidemic

http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/31529/1/Grosvenor%20literature%20review%20DL%20MD.pdf

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